Can Search Engines Crawl And Index Flash Content?

The Official Google Blog announced yesterday that Google has finally developed and implemented an algorithm that can index textual content in Flash files of all kinds. This includes Flash buttons and banners, slideshows, menus and even self-contained Flash websites.

This news is incredibly enormous for many web designers and developers who have perfected the use of Flash in their web designs over the past few years. Flash has always been one of those elements of a website that really helps to set it apart from other dull, static sites but there has always been some backlash from many search marketers as the search engines have always had an extremely difficult, if not impossible, time indexing or even seeing Flash files on websites.

What does this mean for your site if you have Flash on it? Keep in mind that this just got released so don’t expect drastic jumps in indexed Flash files or search results with your site’s Flash homepage on it. Even Google will most definitely have some things to work out with this new algorithm. In addition, there are still two other search engines that people use that do not index Flash files as of yet.

What can you expect with this new Flash indexing algorithm? Google states that “web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content” and also that “you can expect to see better search results and snippets”.

Our suggestions: 1) Don’t start building Flash heavy sites just because of this 2) Counter balance flash heavy pages with some indexable, relevant content 3) Keep Flash files as speedy and compressed as possible as Flash is still not a universal application that every user has 4) If you do use Flash, try to work in textual content as that is all that Google can index right now with this new algorithm 5) Continue to follow SEO Best Practices

If you are interested in reading more about this new announcement then we encourage you to read on here

As always, if none of this makes any sense to you or you would like to know more about what you should or should not do then please feel free to leave us a comment or email.